


Marriott Variations

by whitachi



Category: Heavy Rain
Genre: Hallucinations, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 15:02:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitachi/pseuds/whitachi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Directly follows <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/786283">Calling Mars</a> and <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/786297">To the Rescue</a>. Agent Jayden tries to unwind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marriott Variations

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Calling Mars](https://archiveofourown.org/works/786283) by [ladysisyphus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus). 
  * Inspired by [To the Rescue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/786297) by [ladysisyphus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus). 



He'd cranked the hotel room's air conditioning to as cold as it could go before he'd left that morning, so when he came back late in the night it was like an icebox, a sharp shock to his face when he opened the door. It woke him up a little, which had probably been his intention when he'd thought he'd have to come back and have more work to do. But the hard stuff was over, the bad guy was caught, he'd been the hero again; everything was done except for the reams full of paperwork he'd have to get through when he got back to DC. Now the room wasn't an office waiting for him; it was just a waiting bed. 

Norman took off his coat and hung it up in the closet and flipped on the TV, turning it to the Discovery Channel and knocking the sound down low. It was a nice hotel room--the TV took up most of the wall, and the bed was large enough for four people. He thought about going out to fill up the ice bucket as he took out his ARI glasses and glove from his jacket pocket and set them lightly on the room's desk. ARI always had a glow, a little blue hum from that fucking nuclear battery that had to be melting his brain every time he wore it, even in the updated version. He folded the glove next to the glasses and took off his jacket, hanging it next to where he'd put his other suits in the room's closet. 

He sat on the bed and tugged his tie a little loose as he pulled his phone out of his pants pocket and checked it for the first time all day. It hadn't buzzed, it hadn't rung, but he still felt like he needed to check. No calls, no messages. He wasn't surprised, but somehow it still made him grind his teeth a little, close his burning eyes a little hard. It would have been nice, that was all. A good thing to burn the rough edges of the day off. 

Shaun Mars had come to see him as something between a best friend and a superhero, and while it had been awkward at first, Norman had come to honestly actually enjoy it. Buying the kid a Blizzard while they waited for his dad had turned into the kid finding his dad's phone, finding the right entry, and making a call to him after school one day. Norman had been so surprised by it, so taken aback by the sound of an eleven year old on the other end of his phone line, that he hadn't been able to cut the call off, and before he knew it, he'd ended up in a long conversation about what Shaun had learned that day in school about the sociological groupings of farmer ants. Honestly, it had been pretty fascinating. 

Shaun had made a habit after that of calling him, stealing his dad's phone every day at four thirty, talking to him about what his teachers had done or what he'd learned that day. And of course he had questions, hundreds of questions about Norman and his job, and he answered what he asked, as long as it wasn't a threat to national security. Shaun called him when he was in ARI, when he was working, but God help him if he could hang up. He just gave the kid a task; he described the fish he saw in his ARI environment and let Shaun do his research to guess what kind they were. It killed time, Norman got his work done, Shaun was amused, and neither of them was alone for the afternoon. 

Ethan had found out after a while, and he was mortified, but he was easily mollified enough when Norman told him he just was not bothered. "He's a good kid," he'd said to Ethan, when Shaun had bullied his dad into inviting him over for pizza and a movie, and that had turned into tucking the kid in and sharing a few glasses of whiskey. "If I were too busy to talk to him, I wouldn't pick up the phone." It was a lie, though; Norman would always pick up the line if a Mars were on the other end of it, just out of a soul-deep fear that something wrong had happened. 

So Shaun hadn't called over the days he'd been in St. Louis. His dad had told him, no doubt, that he was away working and couldn't be bothered. It was true, in the end, but there in the small hours of the morning, in his cold hotel room, Norman could admit that he would have liked to hear a friendly small voice tinny in his phone's voicemail. It would have been a stake in the ground of the tent he was trying to cast over the past week, covering the blood and the pain and the diseased mind he'd had to align himself with. He put his phone away and went to mess with the thermostat, ticking it up a few degrees past the minimum, something up to human comfort. 

He took off the rest of his clothes, down to his underwear, hanging them all neatly so they wouldn't wrinkle, lining his shoes up against the wall. The door to the hotel room's bathroom was open, and he could see himself in the mirror there, pale and tired. A year and a half ago he would have dealt with this night differently, he would have handled the end stages with more than just a sigh at the empty mailbox on his phone. A year and a half ago and he would have been gone, not feeling a thing but the hum of his heartbeat too fast in his ears. He got a glass of not-cold-enough water from the tap and drank it before he brushed his teeth and flossed. He'd shower in the morning, before he hit the plane home. 

He flipped off the TV and peeled back the tightly tucked covers on the bed, and set the bedside alarm and the one on his phone before he crawled in under them, sinking into the premium that hotel mattresses afforded. What could be better than hotels: clean (as long as you didn't look with ARI), enough luxuries to get by, a blessed anonymity where nothing that you did there would matter to anyone at all. Norman pulled the crisp sheet with its high thread count over him and closed his eyes, feeling just that layer of fabric and the cold air in the room for a few moments. 

Then he heard the rustle of leaves. 

Norman took a slow breath in and let it out again. If he didn't open his eyes, it wouldn't be so bad, he knew that. He always intellectually knew that this would be easier to ride out if he just kept his eyes closed. It had to be some faulty line of programming, some failure in human nature, but when he knew it was happening he always had to open his eyes and see it for himself, reality exploding around him while he tried to keep a pace of breath. 

The first generation of ARI had done damage to all of the dozen or so of agents who had used it, but Norman had played down the effect it had had on him. He'd seen colleagues retired because they'd started seeing too much, so all he'd reported was one or two little tanks, and of course they'd gone away after a while; he was fine to continue on with later versions. Norman was nothing else but a highly refined liar. He saw more, but he could cope. 

The forest was different for everyone, he'd found out. ARI gave the brain an outline, and it was up to the user to fill in the details. For Norman he knew exactly what his brain was using to fill out every one of those rustling leaves; it was his uncle Gordon's cabin, that October in 1991, when his parents had sent him away for a week. He could remember everything about it, every skidding sound of leaves on wood, every muted burning smell in the distance, every shade of red and orange. All those colors were there in what should have been a dark hotel room when he opened his eyes. 

A leaf fell off a tree above him, and he could feel it brush his face. He knew--he _knew_ \--it wasn't there, but that didn't stop him from feeling it, that never stopped it. He breathed in and breathed out, and all he could smell was the scent of hotel detergent on the sheets, even as the light filtered around him through the trees. He closed his eyes and focused on the scent. This happened when he was tired, and he knew how to ride it out. 

A few minutes of slow breaths, of feeling the bedsheets underneath him and smelling newly washed cotton, and when he opened his eyes it was the darkened hotel room again. Norman closed his eyes again and let out a long sigh, and then he felt the weight settle onto him, felt warmth pressing him through the sheet lain over his body. If he didn't open his eyes, it would go away. He could ignore it, and it would go away. He opened his eyes. 

Ethan Mars was there, a hand pressing into the bed next to him, close enough to his face that he could feel the heat. Ethan was smiling at him, soft-eyed and sweet-mouthed, that same gentle expression he got when he saw Norman talking to Shaun. Only now he was touching his face with his right hand, and Norman knew--he _knew_ \--he wasn't really feeling it, it was nothing but phantoms of his brain, but, oh, God, he could swear he felt fingerprints brushing over his cheek and down onto his neck, trailing low enough to make him tilt his head up and choke a little on his next few breaths. 

If he closed his eyes, it would go away; that was usually the rule. He kept his eyes open a crack, though, just filtering sight through his eyelashes. Ethan hadn't shaved in a while, like he hadn't when he first met him, when he saw him broken in an interrogation room. Ethan leaned in and he could feel the scrape of his beard brushing against his cheek, against where he hadn't shaved in two days and was just barely starting to show stubble. Norman closed his eyes and he could still feel Ethan breathing on his neck, and it just wasn't _fair_. 

He pushed the sheet down off his body, tearing it away from where it had been tucked under the mattress, and he only felt cold air for a few moments before he felt body heat, felt the singing of skin on skin. His hand lifted up from the mattress without his bidding to grab, to hold, but he choked it off before it got too far; he'd been through this before, and he knew that was the worst way it could end, the groping through air. 

Ethan was kissing his neck, and it felt something like a dream, too sharp in some places, and completely gone in others. The heat of his lips was there, the scrape of his beard, but there was no wetness, no lingering coolness as saliva dried on skin. Norman opened his eyes and could see down the length of him in the dim light, see the line of his naked body, warm on top of him. He worked his hands into the mattress and waited. Ethan licked at his ear for a while, with breath that made Norman shiver all the way through, and then he moved to kiss him. 

Norman could feel the heat, he could feel the pressure, he could feel the scrape of teeth on his lips and the tangle of tongues, but there was no _taste_. It was nothing but the dryness of air and the lingering mint in his own mouth. He could feel Ethan's weight on his body, he could feel him shifting into his erection, could see the edge of him too close to be anything but blurriness, but there was no taste but air, no smell but that of an over air-conditioned room. Norman closed his eyes, lifted his hands up, and pushed up on Ethan's shoulders. 

His hands pushed through the air into nothing at all, and it was over. No weight, no heat, no touch on his lips, just him alone with a hotel sheet tangled around his knees and an uncomfortable hard-on. Norman ran his hands over his face. He could use a drink of water, or a splash of water on his face, or a quick bout of jerking off. Instead he pulled the sheet back over him, pulled the blanket over him, and breathed the smell of strange stale hotel detergent in until he fell asleep. 

The next day he got back in DC around two in the afternoon, and around five he found himself staring at his phone, thumb hovering over the screen, wavering in the air. He bit into the air and texted Ethan that he was back in town. 

An hour later Shaun called him, and they talked about tectonic plates. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Do You Still Hear The Voices?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6922009) by [pansexualstein (octavia_romanus)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/octavia_romanus/pseuds/pansexualstein)




End file.
